One of the important goals of physical therapy/rehabilitation is to restore a patient's hampered abilities (due to an injury or older age) to the highest possible level, which usually requires objectively assessing the patient improvement during the course of the physical therapy/rehabilitation. Such rehabilitation generally requires certain actions are taken and met to steadily maintain or increase one's physical attributes. However, the evaluation of a patient during the term of treatment or analysis of the patient has been somewhat unquantified with the use of certain subjective criteria for determination of patient status. Therefore, an objective method and associated devices for making quantifiable determinations of patient improvement is needed for the applications of mobility assistance devices in physical therapy/rehabilitation that permits the collection of reproducible and objective data on patient status and improvement over a course of therapy, thus providing valuable information to the patient and therapist.
Examples of related art are described below:
U.S. Pat. No. 5,311,880 pertains to a walker equipped with detectors for measuring various loads and torques placed thereon by a user including right side and left side loads as well as torque loads on the handles of the walker and having time and distance detectors to allow the ambulation status of a user to be progressively monitored by medical personnel. The system is rather complex and not straight forward to use.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,044,361 pertains to a walker distance measuring device comprising a wheel assembly, a measuring assembly and a display. The wheel assembly is capable of attachment to a walker, and includes a support and a wheel. The measuring assembly comprises a sensor having a trigger associated with one of the support and the wheel and a pickup associated with the other of the support and the wheel. The processor is electronically coupled with the sensor. The processor is capable of interpreting the information received from the sensor. The display is associated with the processor for displaying results computed from the processor. Again, the system therein, while sophisticated, is not straight forward to use.
In this respect, there exists a continuing need for an improved yet simple system which can be used as a resettable distance measuring meter for use with mobility assistance devices, such as a walker or a wheelchair. In this regard, the present invention substantially fulfills this need, as the system, according to the present invention and its embodiments, measures distances traveled by mobility assistance devices. The present system substantially departs from and is superior to the conventional concepts and designs and is intended to be structurally different as a result in some aspects as will be discussed in details below.